Thursday, November 7, 2013

IMPROVED IMAGE BLUR REMOVAL


The Technology below is available for License. Contact Tamir Huberman at Yissum for more information on the technology

Technology Summary
Fattal Raanan, HUJI, School of Computer Science and Engineering, CS - Computer Vision
tamir_huberman_raanan_fattal2.jpg
Fast method eliminates need for repeated reconstructions of latent image
Categories
Computer Science & Engineering, Imaging/Computer Graphics
Development Stage
Completed
Patent Status
Patent application filed in the United States
Highlights
  • In many practical scenarios, such as hand-held cameras or ones mounted on a moving vehicle, it is difficult to eliminate camera shake. Sensor movement during exposure leads to unwanted blur in the acquired image.
  • Current approaches are based on repeated reconstructions of the latent image, which makes them slow. Furthermore, many methods rely on explicit assumptions that do not always hold and thus undermine the accuracy of the estimated kernel and deblurred image.
  • There is therefore a need for a faster, more accurate method for removing blur in digital images.
Our Innovation
Purely statistical approach to recover blur kernel in motion-blurred natural images by extracting a set of statistics from the input image and using them to recover the blur.
Figure: Kernels estimated by different methods and the resulting deblurred images
Key Features
  • More robust and accurate recovery of blur kernel.
  • Able to cope well with images containing under-resolved texture and foliage clutter in outdoor scenes.
  • Input image only accessed once to extract small set of statistics, so the technique depends mostly on blur kernel size and does not scale with the image dimensions.
  • Method achieves highly accurate results in scenarios that challenge other approaches, at fast running times.
  • Method does not rely on the presence or detection of well-defined step edges at multiple orientations as required by other methods.
Development Milestones
  • Seeking licensing opportunities
The Opportunity
  • By 2016, the digital photography market should reach $82.5 billion.
  • Market researchers have predicted that by 2013, nearly 70% of handsets sold in the United States will come equipped with a camera of 2-megapixels or more and that consumers will respond to this trend by making greater use of mobile imaging software, including photo-editing.

CONTENT-SPECIFIC IMAGE ENHANCEMENT


The Technology below is available for License. Contact Tamir Huberman at Yissum for more information on the technology


Technology Summary
Lischinski Daniel, HUJI, School of Computer Science and Engineering, CS - Computer Vision
tamir_huberman_-_dani_lischinski1.jpg
Automatically enhances parts of image according to context
Categories
Computer Science & Engineering  Imaging / Computer Graphics
Development Stage
Research complete
Patent Status
Patent application filed in the United States
Highlights
  • Digital images captured by non-professional photographers requires effective automatic photo enhancement.
  • Most current systems manipulate tone and color over the whole image without understanding and accounting for the content of the image.
Our Innovation
Photo enhancement method that automatically improves the quality of specific image elements such as the sky, human faces, and underexposed salient regions by intelligently taking into account local and global semantics.
Figure 1: Comparison of original on left and results of new method on right
Figure 2: Input images (first left) are compared with our results (second), Photoshop Elements (third), Microsoft Office Picture Manager (fourth) and Google’s Picasa (fifth) 
Key Features
  • Intelligently combines a variety of local tone mapping and color correction operations while taking into account image content.
  • Using existing robust detectors of sky and people, image areas containing human faces, skin, blue sky and clouds, as well as salient underexposed parts of the scene are subjected to customized enhancement operators.
  • Consistently significantly improves the majority of images
  • Outperforms the automatic enhancement operators available in several popular products
Development Milestones
  • Seeking cooperation for licensing and commercialization
The Opportunity
  • Currently, 30 billion images a year are uploaded to Facebook
  • Automatic photograph enhancement tools are included in such popular commercial software packages as Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Office Picture Manager, Google Picasa, and others.


Saturday, July 20, 2013

Director of one of the World’s leading tech transfer firm’s, Yissum, visits ACE


Mr. Tamir Huberman visited ACE, Tekes and Finnish ICT companies 19th-20th September.

Mr. Huberman is VP Business Development in the field of computer science and Director of IT at
Yissum, Technology Transfer company of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In addition, he is also
the IT Director of ITTN; the Israeli Technology Transfer Organization. Prior to joining Yissum in 2004,
Mr. Huberman was the co-founder of Artigon, served as part of the R&D team at Orgenics (AMEX:
IMA) and as the Head of IP and R&D at MedisEl (NASDAQ: MDTL). He holds a MSc. in structural
biology and a BSc. in biology from the Hebrew University, a diploma in computer & electronics and
has continued his MBA studies at the Hebrew University.
As a part of the visit Tamir held a workshop titled “Commercialization of the University’s Intellectual
Property – Technology Transfer Practices”. The seminar gathered an audience from the major
players of the technology transfer field in Finland.
During the seminar Tamir shared his wide knowledge in how tech transfer organizations can vastly
increase their productivity and results, focusing on the modernization of market-facing
functions. Some of the topics were as follows:
• Use of External Databases for locating potential licensees. Snapshot of modern proactive
marketing & commercialization of patents and know-how
• Use of Social Networks for active marketing
• Demonstration of the TTM (Technology Transfer Management) Software. The software that
was developed for Technology Transfer Management at Yissum and is currently also installed
at 5 additional technology transfer companies in Israel.
• Demonstration of the ITTN (Israel Technology Transfer organization) website portal
The presentations were followed with the panel discussion on "Moving the Needle on Tech Transfer in
Finland – how to Leapfrog Towards World Class", moderated by Will Cardwell.
Panelists were:
- Tamir Hubermann, YISSUM
- Pauli Laitinen, Aalto Center for Entrepreneurship
- Timo Pulli, VTT
- Harry Santamaki, KoppiCatch Inc
- Jari Strandman, IP Finland Ltd
"I am proud that Hebrew University’s technology transfer was given the opportunity to take part in
these important meetings and hope to collaborate with Aalto University in the near future. I believe
that both organizations have a lot to gain from such collaboration on several fields of mutual interest."-
said Mr. Huberman.
Mr. Tamir Huberman was invited by Aalto Center for Entrepreneurship and the TEKES Tuliprogramme.

For more information about Yissum Technology Transfer visithttp://www.yissum.co.il

Text: Zaira Mammadova

Photo: courtesy of www.ittn.org.il